Late-Breaking Research Related to the 2017 Hurricane Season in the Americas (Harvey, Irma, Jose, Maria)

In 2017, the Americas have dealt with numerous hurricane events of historic proportion. Two storms have made landfall in the United States in recent weeks after causing devastation to numerous Caribbean nations. Hurricane Harvey arrived as a Category 4 near Rockport, Texas, on 26 August 2017, followed by Hurricane Irma on 10 September 2017 arriving at Cudjoe Key, Fla. Hurricane Maria crippled islands in the Caribbean before arriving in Puerto Rico on 19 September 2017.

This session will be organized as multiple sessions and seeks a wide breadth of contributions focusing on the events of these storms, including crowd-sourced data and social media in disaster response; policy implications; high-resolution remote sensing; flooding and infrastructure damage; impacts on the environment and human health; changing coastal landscapes; oceanographic, atmospheric, and climatic factors contributing to the storm; data access and assimilation; and HPC and cloud computing for real-time analysis.

2017 South East Asia Flooding

Severe flooding recently hit South Asia, resulting in tragic loss of life and extensive damage to property and the environment. India, Bangladesh, and Nepal have been particularly impacted, leaving an estimated 40 million affected and dramatically impacting critical infrastructure. There has been a disproportional smaller awareness of these Southeast Asian events when compared with recent disasters in the United States, despite the larger loss of lives and area of extent. This session seeks contributions on the Southeast Asian Floods, including characterization of the events and impacts, factors leading to their severity, and identification of areas where targeted scientific research and data collection could help build a more resilient society where lives are saved and economic losses are minimized.

Conveners:

Guido Cervone (Lead), Associate Director of the Institute for CyberScience, Pennsylvania State University, State CollegeLesley Wyborn, Australian National University, Adjunct Fellow, National Computational Infrastructure Facility and Research School of Earth Sciences, Canberra, ACT, AustraliaCasey Brown, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Professor

Late-Breaking Session on the North Korean September 3, 2017 Declared Nuclear Test

This session, potentially consisting of oral and poster sections, seeks analysis on the USGS Mb 6.3, Ms 5.0 North Korean (DPRK) declared underground nuclear test at 03:30 UTC on 3 September 2017. This was the sixth and largest DPRK declared nuclear test at the Punggye-ri test site. An apparent aftershock/collapse with USGS ML 4.0, occurred about eight and a half minutes later. North Korea is the only country to have conducted declared nuclear tests in this century, and this is by far the largest nuclear test seismic signal since 1996, when the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was introduced for signature. In this session, we seek studies examining any and all of the multiphenomenological signals (seismic, acoustic, imagery, gas and materials, etc.) generated by this test. We seek studies that compare this test with previous ones at the Punggye-ri site and with those from other historic nuclear test sites.

The September 2017 Tehuantepec and Puebla Earthquakes in Mexico

The 8 and 19 September 2017 Tehuantepec and Puebla earthquakes are some of the largest and most damaging earthquakes ever recorded in Mexico. The Mw 8.1 earthquake (8 September) affected several million people and was widely felt across central and southern Mexico, while the M 7.1 event (19 September) produced strong ground motions in big cities in central Mexico, leading to numerous building collapses and large numbers of casualties. Scientists, engineers, and policy makers will find the implications of these events to be of interest regarding tectonics, seismology, and hazard and risk management in countries with high seismicity rates. This session will cover many aspects of these recent events. Potential topics include, but are not limited to, earthquake source modeling, early warning systems, geodetic and strong ground motion observations, tsunami and broadband ground motion simulations, site effects, and hazard and risk management.